Abbott, Texas Dems offer scapegoats for electricity crisis
CASTING BLAME: Governor contradicts self on renewables
In one interview, he was a solemn governor plainly describing an unfolding crisis and demanding answers. In another, he was a political leader taking shots at national Democrats in a campaignlike performance while millions in his state shivered for another night in the dark.
Gov. Greg Abbott emerged this week with seemingly antithetical messages about the state’s crippling power shortage, one for those struggling through it and one for those perhaps just awakening to its scale.
Speaking Tuesday with local television anchors in Dallas, the Republican said power generators of all types — wind, coal, nuclear and predominately natural gas — had failed amid unusually frigid conditions and that the state’s natural gas supply was “frozen in the pipeline.”
He then appeared on Fox News, telling national viewers that renewable fuel sources were to blame and that the days of mass outages provided even more reason to abandon progressive policies aimed at addressing climate change.
“It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas as well as other states to make sure that we will be able to heat our homes in the wintertime and cool our homes in the summertime,” Abbott said.
Even for political spin, Abbott’s back-to-back performances were a striking bit of rhetorical gymnastics, underscoring a push by Republicans and Democrats to find a quick scapegoat amid the chaos. Renewable energy sources make up just a fraction of the state’s total energy supply and do not account for the extent and duration of the outages that
were still blanketing much of Texas as of Wednesday, according to industry experts and Abbott himself.
“The governor wants to have his cake and eat it, too,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “He wants to be able to nail the Democrats on an energy issue, which would be a political winner for him. But he also has to be realistic in talking to Texas audiences who are without power and water.”
On Wednesday, Abbott walked the Fox News remarks back a bit in a news conference, saying he had already acknowledged the failures of other energy sources. “I was asked a question on one TV show about renewables, and I responded to that question,” he said.
Test for Abbott
The ongoing crisis is another political test for Abbott after a year of widespread suffering, with tens of thousands of Texans dead from COVID-19 and others struggling to find work. The governor has come out emboldened amid the pandemic, having helped Republicans stave off election losses in the Legislature and humoring speculation about a presidential bid.
But the outages and weeks of potential fallout for millions of Texans could disrupt what Abbott had hoped to be a narrow, aggressively conservative legislative session. Already, lawmakers have promised an inquiry into the crisis, and the governor has called for state energy regulators to resign.
“The way that ERCOT has operated is completely unacceptable,” Abbott said Tuesday on WFAA, referring to the state’s regulatory body, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. “And we’re going to drill down into it this session and make sure that we have changes in the way that it is structured and operates.”
The urgency is not just about restoring power to homeowners. Like his predecessor, Rick Perry, Abbott has defined much of his governorship by the ability to attract new companies to Texas. Those negotiations could be threatened if the state’s energy grid appears unreliable.
“I’m flashing forward to the first question at the 2024 Republican nomination debate, and it is going to be about Texas’ failure in February of 2021 on energy,” Rottinghaus said. “That’s going to be the first question, and it will likely be the first attack line from somebody.”
While state leaders begin scrambling for answers, Abbott and other prominent Republicans have revived the long-running attack on green energy, which makes up a little over 10 percent of the state’s supply. Some conservatives, especially in Texas, are eager to defend the oil and gas industry, arguing that fossil fuels are too critical to give up, despite the pollutants they emit.
“If the last few days have proven anything, it’s that we need oil & gas,” Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush tweeted Tuesday. “Relying solely on renewable energy would be catastrophic. Many of these sources have proven to be unreliable.”
Democratic anger
Democrats, meanwhile, were just as quick to point fingers at the state’s deregulated energy market, which they helped create two decades ago and which has limited industry oversight.
Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton University who has been monitoring the state’s crisis, said in a
Twitter thread that it was probably not a direct culprit in the outages this week.
“It is hard to say until all the facts are in, but this feels like a systematic failure in planning that extends across all parties,” he wrote, emphasizing the need for better weatherproofing of power plants and transmission lines.
Other Democrats said they were furious with Republican leaders, who have controlled the state government for years and blocked an attempt years ago at enforcing cold weather preparations.
Addressing Abbott’s remarks on Fox News, Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa said the governor was “more interested in scoring political points than helping the millions of Texans who have been without power for days.”
“He is doing so while his constituents freeze to death or catch hypothermia in their homes, while they struggle without access to necessary medical care and supplies, and while their families go hungry,” he said in a statement.
“It is hard to say until all the facts are in, but this feels like a systematic failure in planning that extends across all parties.”
Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton University